When I will no longer be there, don’t look for me behind the cold marble of a tomb: look for me in the roses, in the photographs, look for me among my books, among my poems, my songs, among my music. Look for me among all the things I love most, because only in these things you will find my soul ».
The concert that inaugurated the season of the Vittorio Emanuele Theater on Sunday – difficult to forget for those who have had the good fortune to assist you – is delivered to the history of Messina in the form of a spiritual testament. A flowery and kind testament like the large bouquet placed in front of the Leggio of Genziana D’Anna, the cellor who died last Friday during the tests. At any cost he wanted to play it, Gentian, this ninth symphony of Beethoven, despite serious health problems and known to everyone. And in the face of the dilemma of pain, which in similar cases would impose silence, in Spirito has entrusted his message to the colleagues of the orchestra: play for me, without me. He did it through a phone call to his brother’s theater, to which he made it say, in the manner of Jim Morrison: in this music, he loved, look for his soul.
What has been seen and listened to reflects, but before he still does honor. He honors the Messina theater orchestra, first of all. He performed a monumental score almost to the imprint, with very few tests, amazed to have to do it, and with the results we will say about. He honors Maurizio Salemi, the first cello and friend of a lifetime, who in front of the microphone commemorated Genziana in a few simple words, allowing himself the dignity of the tears. He honors Maestro Matthias Fletzberger, who had given himself available, in case of renunciation of the orchestra, to perform the ninth alone, on the piano, with soloists and choir. And that, at the microphone, has combined the humanism of the very high message of Beethoven’s masterpiece to the brotherhood of making music in communion, art that transcends the individual ego, to put it with Yehudi Menhuin, and makes yourself lose to find himself in the whole.
He honors, above all that the Orchestra of the Vittorio Emanuele Theater of Messina has touched, in Memoriam of Genziana D’Anna, one of the leaders of his ultra thirty years of existence, especially in the wonderful adage placed in the third movement, in which the contrasts of the first two melt in pure song and where the arches, its arches, never in memory of the writer had returned such a rarefied, moving and moving expressive. The rest did it on the Fletzberger podium, keeping in a balance that touches the miraculous the dizzying architectures of the first movement, dilating the times of the joke, as if to transmit its rhythmic drives in reverberation of inelutability, merciless to the point of denying its name, and finally leaving the hymn to joy to its explosion. Deeply participating, the magnificent quartet of the German soloists – Liene Kinca, soprano, Stepanha Pucalkova, Mezzosoprano, Aj Gluacker, tenor and Thomas J. Mayer, bass – and literally incredible the magisterium of the opera choir “Francesco Cilea”, now absurd to professional levels, and there is no better compliment to be made to a handful of extraordinary amateurs. Where there is a lot of light, the shadow is deeper, said Goethe, and it is true: here absolute beauty reveals the unity of the opposites – the light of inspiration and the shadow of life and death – and in the tension of the two opposite poles the human spirit recognizes himself a member of a community, even before the individual.
And wonderful it would be, in dark times for culture in a lot of the world, that the legacy – ethical and professional – of Professor D’Anna was collected, as well as by the orchestra that was his family – never stabilized and a precarious 32 years – by his theater and his audience, also from the city and regional institutions, at all levels. The orchestra is a heritage for a city, enriches it and honors her: reopening a reflection on the topic would be, this is the most honorable than an unresolved silence.